Introduction

Text

Self-contained and recognizable form of written or printed glyphs, characters, symbols, or sentences that is cohesive and coherent with various communicative purposes.

Types of Text

Descriptive, Narrative, Expository, & Argumentative
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Analyze the Text:

1) As a material object
2) As a work of art
3) From your own point of view as an individual reader

Textual Analysis

Textual analysis is any systematic reduction of a flow of text (or other symbols) to a standard set of statistically manipulable symbols representing the presence, the intensity, or the frequency of some of the characteristics relevant to social science. (Shapiro and Markoff, 1997, p.14)

How to Conduct Textual Analysis

★To establish a methodological framework
★We are not use document for support or validate other data
★More semiotic perspective which means "an analytic perspective that examines how documents can be treated as systems of signs and modes of representation (cf. Feldman 1995). Through illustrating such an approach we consider how one needs to take account of the form of textual materials, the distinctive uses of language they may display, the relationships between tests and the conventions of genre.
★The Important Analytical question is : what kind of reality is this document creating and how does it do it? (Silverman, 2011)
★Textual analysis resource: http://www.rae.ac.uk/ ( UK's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) )

Documentary language and form

--The specialised use of language associated with particular domains of everyday life ( there could be a game, to find a article of a personal diary, ads about wine, a performance introduction, offical documents, twitter language)
--Language are not always used to describe something, they can also be used to accomplish the act itself.
--Inter texual relationship
·Document format
·Temporal dimensions in documentary realities
·Authorship and Readership
Some documents are written for a group of designated readers
--Text can be examined for their formal properties. (language, rhetorical features)

Document as Resources:
Text-mining techniques- semantic web- possible to see the number of times selected terms are repeted.also shows how the words are co-occurred or associated.p97 example ?
Document as Topic Data
could be tangible, and it is better to treat these document as topics and ask how the documents are produced.